As a service to readers and copy editors, I feel the need to point out that “The Snow Geese” and “The Snow Goose” are not the same thing. “The Snow Geese” (plural), a new play by Sharr White that opened on Thursday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is a sentimental tale set during World War I. “The Snow Goose” (singular), a novella from the early 1940s by Paul Gallico, is a sentimental tale set during World War II.

Still confused? There are other distinctions to be made. Though skewered by critics for its high sucrose content, Gallico’s “Snow Goose,” a fable of a lonely, bitter artist and a life-giving country lass, has had susceptible readers choking up for seven decades. “The Snow Geese,” a fable of a family that isn’t as rich as it thinks it is, is unlikely to stir any emotion other than bewilderment as to how this lifeless play wound up on Broadway.

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The Snow Geese Christopher Innvar and Mary-Louise Parker in this play running through Dec. 15 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in Manhattan.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

I can answer that question in two words (or three, if you don’t count hyphens): Mary-Louise Parker. She, as you may know, is the actress who charmed Broadway audiences into happy submission in “Prelude to a Kiss” and “Proof,” and went on to become a television star as the pot-peddling mother of “Weeds.”

In her first New York stage appearance since an ill-advised “Hedda Gabler” in 2009 and the more recent cancellation of “Weeds,” Ms. Parker portrays a woman in denial in “The Snow Geese.” The play is directed by Daniel Sullivan, who helped steer Ms. Parker to a well-earned Tony Award for best actress in “Proof.”

And “The Snow Geese” is written by Mr. White, whose breakthrough work was “The Other Place,” a suspenseful drama (also on Broadway at the Friedman) that won high praise for its star, Laurie Metcalf, another fine stage actress most widely known for television, as the lovelorn sister in “Roseanne.” Given these factors, you can probably do the math even if you aren’t a theater producer.

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From left, Victoria Clark, Evan Jonigkeit, Danny Burstein, Brian Cross and Mary-Louise Parker, playing a troubled family in “The Snow Geese,” presented by Manhattan Theater Club.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

Yet though the equation is superficially the same, the numbers don’t add up here. Set in 1917, “The Snow Geese” also might have been written in 1917, by an eager and callow young playwright in thrall to the modern masters of his day. In its setting and circumstances, a past-its-prime country lodge on the eve of epochal change, “The Snow Geese” brings to mind Chekhov, as do its restless, anxious characters.

This work’s grinding plot machinery and staggered revelations — which involve bookkeeping ledgers, blurring class lines and the drug laudanum — summon the carefully assembled topical melodramas of Harley Granville-Barker. And as a portrait of people who live in pipe dreams, “The Snow Geese” invites comparison to Ibsen, whose “Wild Duck,” another play with a fondness for avian symbolism, deals trenchantly with the same theme.

Heck, I even found myself thinking, a bit anachronistically, of Shaw’s talky but great World War I country house play, “Heartbreak House” (1919), and Jean Renoir’s great (no qualifiers) pre-World War II country house movie, “Rules of the Game” (1939), and the pretty good pre-World War I country house film “The Shooting Party” (1985). So perhaps I should thank “The Snow Geese” for bringing up triggering so many fond memories.

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Mary-Louise Parker and Danny Burstein in a scene from Sharr White's new Broadway play at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Published OnOct. 24, 2013

On its own, though, Mr. White’s play remains a muddle of pastiche parts that never cohere into an original and organic whole. And the cast members — who include the excellent Broadway veterans Victoria Clark and Danny Burstein and several attractive young newcomers — fail to convince us, and perhaps even themselves, otherwise. The same might be said of Ms. Parker, whose preternaturally youthful face seems frozen in mild astonishment, as if she were surprised to find herself here.

You could argue that such an expression suits Ms. Parker’s character, Elizabeth Gaesling, a beautiful and frivolous creature who has recently lost her patrician husband (to a heart attack, not the war) and also seems doomed to lose much of her social standing. Elizabeth has gathered what’s left of her squabbling clan at the family hunting lodge outside Syracuse (a dark-wood affair, designed by John Lee Beatty) for one last morning of game shooting before her elder, golden-boy son, Duncan (Evan Jonigkeit), ships off to France with his regiment.

This forever-young matriarch (a fashion plate in period mourning clothes designed by Jane Greenwood) has another son, too, the 18-year-old Arnold (Brian Cross), though she tends to forget that he’s there. Arnold’s a sourpuss, always going on about how Daddy left them all broke, and how the family’s gentility is a sham. Also on hand are Elizabeth’s sister, the Bible-thumping Clarissa Hohmann (Ms. Clark), who is married to Max (Mr. Burstein), a brandy-tippling German-born physician whose American practice has been destroyed by xenophobia.

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Returning to Broadway after a long, successful run in Hollywood, Mary Louise Parker is set to take the leading role in the play “The Snow Geese.”Published OnOct. 10, 2013

The late, lamented Theodore, Elizabeth’s husband, makes a guest appearance as a laudanum-and-ukulele-conjured ghost (played by Christopher Innvar), while a pretty young Ukranian maid, Viktorya Gryaznoy (Jessica Love), who has known better days herself, is there to remind the Gaeslings that things could be a lot worse.

Mr. White deploys these figures in the interests of family soap opera and larger social commentary. Angry sibling rivalry flares within both generations. And while Ms. Parker and Ms. Clark have a lovely, if fleeting, scene of sisterly solicitude in the second act, the friction between the brothers inspires some of Mr. White’s least felicitous dialogue. (Duncan of his brother: “He’s got to learn how to take a joke.” Arnold: “You’ve got to learn how to make one.”) And, in a turn no young actor should be required to take on, poor Mr. Jonigkeit is saddled with an “Uncle Vanya”-style collapse involving a gun.

Elizabeth exists in a fairly continuous state of nervous breakdown, though she rises to maternal wisdom toward the end. She is also meant to be one of those lively, madcap seductresses who embody the irresistible allure of a dying class.

As reliably delectable as Ms. Parker usually is, she is strangely stiff and uncomfortable here. Her character also suffers when compared with another, more persuasive avatar of fading lucre, the heroine played by Jessica Hecht in last season’s “Assembled Parties,” by Richard Greenberg, which, like “The Snow Geese,” was a Manhattan Theater Club production. As I said, the value of Mr. White’s evocation of things past may lie in its gift for making you think of other, better plays past.